


bright eyes

by thethrillof



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dehumanization, F/M, Gen, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25600606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thethrillof/pseuds/thethrillof
Summary: The Queen who is not a mother is given a chance she may yet squander.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 69





	bright eyes

The White Lady’s growing blindness mattered little to her.

The many Roots that she is are enough for her to sense the world around her, farther than eyes ever could. She felt the Hollow Knight fail as she felt the cowering of Mantis Traitors outside as she felt the people of the City fall still. This is how it was, and this was how it would always be, until either the new Vessel usurped the one that failed, or until the Infection came to consume her as well.

Neither of these happen. The Hollow Knight is not destroyed. The Radiance is not contained within the Vessel that found its way to her. The Infection, instead, shudders and twists, pustules she felt pressing against distant roots shrinking and cooling until they burn no more.

Hallownest has a greater chance to survive. She is as pleased as she is wary, at first.

Quickly, something else comes to replace it.

Like the Hollow Knight, and unlike. A sensation similar to cold. Not at all empty.

She long since held the belief she did not fear death. She fully expected it to come for her one day, tearing past Dryya to rip into her. And yet now, the White Lady feels a dread as numbness creeps along her roots.

Her awareness shrinks from across the kingdom to only her gardens, and then only to her abode. It leaches the light from her. The sensation that lingers at the end of her roots spike with the briefest pain. Absolute severance. She is capable of growing out again, but this will take some time.

And she suspects there will not be a chance.

The world shakes with unsound, the cry of the impure Vessel’s breaking in inverse.

The thick walls give way like rotten fruit beneath massive claws. The tendrils that grew upward are torn asunder, the same pain and numbness taking their places.

Something stands above her. Smaller than her beloved Wyrm had been, yet dwarfing her reduced form. Its mere presence smothers her light. This is the being that has cut her back, crushing her with lifelessness inherent to Void.

What a terrible, unexpected change the strange Vessel has caused.

“Well?” she says at last. Her fear does not thread through her voice. She comprehends not what it wants, the stoic silence as blinding as the Vessel who returned with the Kingsoul, distorted, and to offer the thrumming power of a beauty from lands beyond. “If peace is desired, leave me. If destruction, there is no greater chance than now.”

A god of life and growth can outwait the silence; she does, though the pressure of Void blankets her vision with bursting black spots that overtake the blur of the world she has come to see.

It seems to find her wanting. Or the options she had offered, perhaps.

The presence withdraws, at least from nearby. It could lurk within the shadows of her Garden yet.

No miracle occurs to knit the place she’s called home for so long together again. She can hear the whispers of the plants that surround her, but cannot see or feel them.

For the first time, her chosen bindings feel a genuine prison.

Loyal Dryya does not appear when she calls.

The White Lady droops. Nothing would stop her from her Queen’s orders beyond severe injury and death. Much time has passed since she last reported. More than she had fathomed, in her own agelessness and the Kingdom’s stasis. Hallownest will be deprived without her in it, whether she had been felled by the mantis invaders or the Void that had just torn its way to her.

It was inevitable, she supposes. But she must save mourning for later.

Her bonds can be broken with assistance of another, or, with greater difficulty, on her own. If she does so herself, she will expend energy that will cull her ability to grow for some time. She can wait as she always has, exposed and incapable of knowing the risks prowling her gardens.

Her focus is expanded, straining against the seal that binds her. A pulse of light and power that grows, repeated thrice, before the world bursts with brightness she can see even with near-blindness and her eyes shut tight.

The runes shatter around her.

The physical bindings are a far simpler matter. She briefly rests to the sound of distant water before shifting and wriggling from each layer.

She is nearly done when the crushing weight returns.

Immediately, the White Lady halts, turning her head around and upward, preparing for the creature’s silhouette to loom once more.

For a breath, it does, before one great claw presses itself against the back of her head. Agitation prickles through her, her roots curling inward, but it does not behead her, only pushing her down. Her prostration is what it desires, then? Submission from what light and other god is left of Hallownest?

It is then she sees there is more Void swirling around her base. The pure liquid form she had been most familiar with, imbuing her seeds with it alongside the Pale King, before it was discovered pulling it from the Abyss merely destroyed their bodies, not replacing them.

Little spots of light rise from the darkness.

Her first foolish impulse is to deem them lumaflies, but they would not survive direct contact with Void. They would not come in pairs.

Her Wyrm had written reports of what happened to the ones that broke prematurely. She had read them in his whispering voice, of the temporary Shades the Void had formed in the Abyss, keeping the shape of the masks, left only with instinctive malevolence and fading to nothingness. She had chosen not to read further; only the chosen Vessel mattered, not the fragments that would never ascend. Her pity would be a waste on what would eventually return inertly to the sea of Void.

Her attention so captured, the claw pulls away. The looming shadow of the newly-risen god is again beyond her senses. All that is left surrounding her are the broken remnants of the failures.

She moves her head, trying to sense how many are near. A pale root from her head brushes a shade too close, and what bursts from it is an awful paralyzing shriek, shying away. 

The eyes flicker as one, responding to a piece of the collective Void’s pain.

The onslaught she braces for does not come.

Some eyes fade—taking flight, she realizes, shrinking to pinholes of light in the distance and disappearing. Some sink, trying to avoid her head, though more roots linger under her remaining bindings and beneath the ground. A few seem to startle and puff up, swinging towards her face but recoiling before true impact.

As the new Vessel had been dissimilar from the Hollow Knight in their pureness and ideas instilled, each are different. These fragments of unlife, these failed Vessels, are acting discordantly from each other as well, not unified at all.

And they do not leave.

She waits, half-encased the remains of her bindings. Patience comes to her naturally. 

They drift away and back, clustering around her, brushing over the grass with a whisper that quickly becomes familiar.

The dark god appears again, once or twice, to survey her, and to usher the Shades back towards her. There is a distinct sense of something akin to...disappointment. It crawls over her bark. It may be its, or it may be her own, projected as her beloved had projected perfection on the first Vessel.

When none of this changes, it comes that she may understand, at least in part, what the Void-Focused god desires.

The White Lady is not the mother of these beings. She is of life, and they do not live. She did not have the right to caretake living things born of her, as she had perverted nature of the world and herself when she put Hallownest above all else. She cannot touch them. She expects she will never be able to love them.

Her gardens lie overgrown. The thorns of Infection are rotting, the plants crying out with their scents in a way the Shades cannot.

Void-shapes gather beneath leaves, behind petals of her massive flowers. Some bump together, while others dart from one shadowed place to another, sneaking or watching her outright.

She cannot be a mother, but she can allow her sanctuary to be a shelter. Caretaking one to be at least somewhat taking care of the others.

Mortal lifetimes have passed since she last stood. The blurs of soul-bright eyes turn to face her, as though understanding this. Fragments of curiosity is more likely, and quiet fear higher still.

Her roots wind into legs that tremble as she takes a step forward. She holds little Queenly grace as she nearly trips over herself.

Shades that gather around the edge of her brightness quiver. It may or may not be shock. Laughter.

…Worry.

The White Lady inhales deeply, and makes herself continue forward.

She rediscovers her gardens. Void rivers flow through it, eroding paths in the leaves and grass, but each are angled and calculated, killing the least that grow around paths. The gates her husband had erected to protect her in a then-unknown parting gift are broken. She could pass it by, if she so chooses, and see what ruin the Void has left of Hallownest.

Or what it has not. She had willingly left it in the hands of another. The Vessel, the one perhaps pure, the one that offered her a delicate gift. The one she had felt dart along the halls of her dwelling as the little blurs of darkness following her do.

They are not children. 

They gather behind her all the same as she stands at the edge, rustling in place. Awaiting her choice.

_They are not children._

…She does not know what they are, if they are not.

They have left the Abyss, which was meant to be impossible. They have been given to her by a god with mastery of Void that was previously unimaginable.

Perhaps she had been in error before, just as her King had been. 

“My place is here. I will not leave,” the White Lady murmurs aloud, to the shades that linger behind her as much as herself. “If nothing else, I am able to promise this.”


End file.
